The Zurich Axioms By Max Gunther
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A superstition need not be exorcised. It can be enjoyed, provided it is kept in its place.
Most of us carry at least a few pieces of superstitious baggage about with us. Even if we aren’t full-dress devotees of an occult belief such as astrology, we keep good-luck charms or have an aversion to the number 13. As we’ve seen, any religious, mystical, or superstitious belief can be a serious hazard to any body who would get rich.
But if you do harbor such a belief or semibelief, you don’t have to embark on a laborious program of scoffing it out of your life. Such a program would probably fail anyhow. If you don’t like walking under ladders, you don’t like it. Instead of exorcising it, all you have to do is learn how and when it can reasonably play a role in your financial life.
The role will be distinctly minor, even trivial. But if you are fond of this mystical or quasi-mystical thing of yours, at least you will be able to keep it as a pet.
In what follows I will be using the word ‘superstition’ from time to time. I intend no sarcasm or disapproval in this usage. What’s superstition to me, may be religion to you, and vice versa. As used here, ‘superstition’ means a supernatural belief that isn’t shared by everybody.
There is a way to let a superstition into your financial life, and there is a time to do it. One of each: just one. All other ways and times can lead you to disaster.
The way to do it humorously.
The time to do is when you are in a situation that absolutely will not lend itself to rational analysis.
An example: picking a number to play in a sate lottery or numbers game. One number is as good as another. There are no handholds for analysis. No amount of cogitation is going to give you even the most microscopic edge over other players. The outcome will be determined entirely by chance. We’ve noted that chance plays an enormous role in other money ventures such as the stock market, but at least there you have an opportunity to do some thinking and hunching in the struggle for speculative advantages. In the case of a pick-a-number game there is no such opportunity.
Then what do you do? There is only one thing you can do. Relax. Have some fun. With a grin on your face – for it is important never to take this kind of approach seriously – lean on your pet superstition.
Charles Kellner of Hillsdale, New Jersey, is a man who plays this fiddle perfectly. He has his money in real estate, a restaurant, and other ventures, and where those are concerned, no supernatural belief ever intrudes on his calculations. But when he plays the New Jersey state numbers game, he falls back on something that he cheerfully admits is weird: tips received in dreams.
In one New Jersey game you try to guess a three-digit number. Your ticket to play costs you 50 cents, and if you win, you get $500. Charlie Kellner had been playing this game without success for a time when, one night, he had a dream about a haunted house. The house number, 283, had some importance in the plot of the dream, and Charlie found this number lodged in his mind when he awoke. He does not know why. It was a number that had any significance to him. Just for fun, however, he bet on 283 in the lottery that day – and lo and behold, won $500.
Not many weeks later he had another dream, this time about his mother. In the same spirit of fun, he bet the next day on the number of a house where she had once lived. That number, too, proved a winner.
“He’s Charlie the Three-Digit Dreamer”, says his wife, Dolores. “I’m going to load him up with sleeping pills. He makes more money per house asleep than he ever did awake.”
Charlie Kellner has fun with his nocturnal omens. They play only the most inconsequential part in his financial affairs. He lets them intrude only at times when he is playing games with his money and only in situations that are impervious to rational figuring-out.
Not being of a superstitious turn of mind, he doesn’t believe he really possesses a magical ability to generate dreams. But even if he did – or even if he harbored a whispery little thought that it might be so – it would make no difference to his financial well-being. By using the superstition in the right way at the right time, he gets it out of his system.
Speculative Strategy
Now let’s review the Eighth Axiom. What does it have to say about money and religion and the occult?
It says, essentially, that money and the supernatural are an explosive mixture that can blow up in your face. Keep the two worlds apart. There is no evidence that God has the slightest interest in your bank account, nor is there any evidence that any occult belief or practice has ever been able to produce consistently good financial results for its devotees. The most anybody has ever been able to show is an occasional, isolated bull’s-eye hit, which gets a lot of attention but proves nothing except that lucky flukes happen.
To expect help from God or from occult or psychic powers is not just useless but also dangerous. It can lull you into an unworried state – which, as we’ve seen, is not a good state for a speculator to be in. In handling your money, assume you are entirely on your own. Lean on nothing but your own good wits.